Kapwani Kiwanga’s work is research-driven, tracing historical narratives to assess the global impact and cultural permeance of international relationships. This large-scale monograph is polyphonic – a collection of works and voices spanning the entirety of Kiwanga’s career, which began in 2009. Each project has a different visual language, making use of different mediums and outputs, yet is brought together through a universal archival language. Text inserts punctuate groups of works in the book, which emerge independently, on a different layer and paper to the rest of the book.
The book begins with an inventory printed on a sequence of mushroom–coloured papers. The content and materiality of these pages are intended to appear like an archival inventory, rather than a traditional table of contents, as a reference to Kiwanga’s research-based methodology. The folded pages slotted between certain themes echo the recurring folding gesture of Kiwanga’s work, yet also behave like ad-hoc page markers to this research document.
Photography: Ed Park
